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Addictions

Canada’s ‘safer supply’ patients are receiving staggering amounts of narcotics

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2 years ago

11 minute read

Image courtesy of Midjourney.

How a Small Population Fuels a Black Market Epidemic, Echoing Troubling Parallels in Sweden

A significant amount of safer supply opioids are obviously being diverted to the black market, but some influential voices are vehemently downplaying this problem. They often claim that there are simply too few safer supply clients for diversion to be a real issue – but this argument is misleading because it glosses over the fact that these clients receive truly staggering amounts of narcotics relative to everyone else.

“Safer supply” refers to the practice of prescribing free recreational drugs as an alternative to potentially-tainted street substances. In Canada, that typically means distributing eight-mg tablets of hydromorphone, an opioid as potent as heroin, to mitigate the use of illicit fentanyl.

There is clear evidence that most safer supply clients regularly sell or trade almost all of their hydromorphone tablets for stronger illicit substances, and that this is flooding communities with the drug and fuelling new addictions and relapses. Just five years ago, the street price of an eight-mg hydromorphone tablet was around $20 in major Canadian cities – now they often go for as little as $1.

But advocates repeatedly emphasize that, even if such diversion is occurring, it must be a minor issue because there are only a few thousand safer supply clients in Canada. They believe that it is simply impossible for such a small population to have a meaningful impact on the overall black market for diverted pharmaceuticals, and that the sudden collapse of hydromorphone prices must have been caused by other factors.

This is an earnest belief – but an extremely ill-informed one.

It is difficult to analyze safer supply at the national level, as each province publishes different drug statistics that make interprovincial comparisons near-impossible. So, for the sake of clarity, let’s focus primarily on B.C., where the debate over safer supply has raged hottest.

According to a dashboard published by the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, there were only 4,450 safer supply clients in the province in December 2023, of which 4,250 received opioids. In contrast, the 2018/19 British Columbia Controlled Prescription Drug Atlas (more recent data is unavailable) states that there were approximately 80,000 hydromorphone patients in the province that year – a number that is unlikely to have decreased significantly since then.

We can thus reasonably assume that safer supply clients represent around 5 per cent of the province’s total hydromorphone patients – but if so few people are on safer supply, how could they have a profound impact on the black market? The answer is simple: these clients receive astonishing sums of the drug, and divert at an unparalleled level, compared to everyone else.

Safer supply clients generally receive 4-8 eight-mg tablets per day at first, but almost all of them are quickly moved up to higher doses. In B.C., most patients are kept at 14 tablets (112-mg in total) per day, which is the maximum allowed by the province’s guidelines. For comparison, patients in Ontario can receive as many as 30 tablets a day (240-mg in total).

These are huge amounts.

The typical hydromorphone dose used to treat post-surgery pain in hospital settings is two-mg every 4-6 hours – or roughly 12-mg per day. So that means that safer supply clients can receive roughly 10-20 times the daily dose given to acute pain patients, depending on which province they’re located in. And while acute pain patients are tapered off hydromorphone after a few weeks, safer supply clients receive their tablets indefinitely.

Some chronic pain patients (i.e. people struggling with severe arthritis) are also prescribed hydromorphone – but, in most cases, their daily dose is 12-mg or less. The exception here is terminally ill cancer patients, who may receive up to around 100-mg of hydromorphone per day. However, this population is relatively small, so we once again have a situation where safer supply patients are, for the most part, receiving much more hydromorphone than their peers.

Not only do safer supply patients receive incredible amounts of the drug, they also seem to divert it at much higher rates – which is a frequently overlooked factor.

The clandestine nature of prescription drug diversion makes it near-impossible to measure, but a 2017 peer-reviewed study estimated that, in the United States, up to 3 per cent of all prescription opioids end up on the black market.

In contrast, it appears that safer supply patients divert 80-90 per cent of their hydromorphone.

These numbers should be taken with a grain of salt, as there have been no attempts to measure safer supply diversion – harm reduction researchers tend to simply ignore the problem, which means that we must rely on journalistic evidence that is necessarily anecdotal in nature. While this evidence has its limits, it can, at the very least, illustrate the rough scale of the problem.

For example, in London, Ontario, I interviewed six former drug users last summer who said that, of the safer supply clients they knew, 80 per cent sold almost all of their hydromorphone – just one interviewee placed the number closer to 50 per cent. More recently, I interviewed an addiction outreach worker in Ottawa who estimated that 90 per cent of safer supply clients diverted their drugs. These numbers are consistent with the testimony of dozens of addiction physicians who have said that safer supply diversion is ubiquitous.

Let us take a conservative estimate and imagine that only 30 per cent of safer supply hydromorphone is diverted – even this would be potentially catastrophic.

So we can see why any serious attempt to discuss safer supply diversion cannot narrowly focus on patient numbers – to ignore differences in doses and diversion rates is inexcusably misleading.

But we don’t need to rely on theory to make this point, because the recent parliamentary testimony of Fiona Wilson, who is deputy chief of the Vancouver Police Department and president of the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police (BCACP), illustrates the situation quite neatly.

Wilson testified to the House of Commons health committee earlier this month that half of the hydromorphone recently seized in B.C. can be attributed to safer supply. As she did not specify whether the other half was attributed to other sources, or simply of indeterminate origin, the actual rate of safer supply hydromorphone seizures may actually be even higher.

As, once again, safer supply clients constitute roughly 5 per cent of the total hydromorphone patient population, Wilson’s testimony suggests that, on a per capita basis, safer supply patients divert at least 18 times more of the drug than everyone else.

This is exactly what one would expect to find given our earlier analysis, and these facts, by themselves, repudiate the argument that safer supply diversion is insignificant. When a small population is at least doubling the street supply of a dangerous pharmaceutical opioid, this is a problem.

The fact that so few people can cause substantial, system-wide harm is not unprecedented. In fact, this exact same problem was observed in Sweden, which, from 1965-1967, experimented with a model of safer supply that closely resembled what is being done in Canada today. A small number of patients – barely more than a hundred – were given near-unlimited access to free recreational drugs under the assumption that this would keep them “safe.”

But these patients simply sold the bulk of their drugs, which caused addiction and crime rates to skyrocket across Stockholm. Commentators at the time referred to safer supply as “the worst scandal in Swedish medical history,” and, even today, the experiment remains a cautionary tale among the country’s drug researchers.

It is simply wrong to say that there are too few safer supply clients to cause a diversion crisis. People who make this claim are ignorant of contemporary and historical facts, and those who wish to position themselves as drug experts should be mindful of this, lest they mislead the public about a destructive drug crisis.

This article was originally published in The Bureau, a Canadian publication devoted to using investigative journalism to tackle corruption and foreign influence campaigns. You can find this article on their website here.

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Addictions

Activists Claim Dealers Can Fix Canada’s Drug Problem

Published on November 18, 2025

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By Adam Zivo

We should learn from misguided experiments with activist-driven drug ideologies.

Some Canadian public-health researchers have argued that the nation’s drug dealers, far from being a public scourge, are central to the cause of “harm reduction,” and that drug criminalization makes it harder for them to provide this much-needed “mutual aid.” Incredibly, these ideas have gained traction among Canada’s policymakers, and some have even been put into practice.

Gillian Kolla, an influential harm-reduction activist and researcher, spearheaded the push to whitewash drug trafficking in Canada. Over the past decade, she has advocated for many of the country’s failed laissez-faire drug policies. In her 2020 doctoral dissertation, she described her hands-on research into Toronto’s “harm reduction satellite sites”—government-funded programs that paid drug users to provide services out of their homes.

The sites Kolla studied were operated by the nonprofit South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC) in Toronto. Addicts participating in the programs received $250 per month in exchange for distributing naloxone and clean paraphernalia (needles and crack pipes, for example), as well as for reversing overdoses and educating acquaintances on safer consumption practices. At the time of Kolla’s research (2016–2017), the SRCHC was operating nine satellite sites, which reportedly distributed about 1,500 needles and syringes per month.

Canada permits supervised consumption sites—facilities where people can use drugs under staff oversight—to operate so long as they receive an official exemption via the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. As the sites Kolla observed did not receive exemptions, they were certainly illegal. Kolla herself acknowledged this in her dissertation, writing that she, with the approval of the University of Toronto, never recorded real names or locations in her field notes, in case law enforcement subpoenaed her research data.

Even so, the program seems to have enjoyed the blessing of Toronto’s public health officials and police. The satellite sites received local funding from 2010 onward, after a decade of operating on a volunteer basis, apparently with special protection from law enforcement. In her dissertation, Kolla described how SRCHC staff trained police officers to leave their sites alone, and how satellite-site workers received special ID badges and plaques to ward off arrest.

Kolla made it clear that many of these workers were not just addicts but dealers, too, and that tolerance of drug trafficking was a “key feature” of the satellite sites. She even described, in detail, how she observed one of the site workers packaging and selling heroin alongside crackpipes and needles.

In her dissertation, Kolla advocated expanding this permissive approach. She claimed that traffickers practice harm reduction by procuring high-quality drugs for their customers and avoiding selling doses that are too strong.

“Negative framings of drug selling as predatory and inherently lacking in care make it difficult to perceive the wide variety of acts of mutual aid and care that surround drug buying and selling as practices of care,” she wrote.

In truth, dealers routinely sell customers tainted or overly potent drugs. Anyone who works in the addiction field can testify that this is a major reason that overdose deaths are so common.

Ultimately, Kolla argued that “real harm reduction” should involve drug traffickers, and that criminalization creates “tremendous barriers” to this goal.

The same year she published her dissertation, Kolla cowrote a paper in the Harm Reduction Journal with her Ph.D. supervisor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health. The article affirmed the view that drug traffickers are essential to the harm-reduction movement. Around this time, the SRCHC collaborated with the Toronto-based Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre— the only other organization running such sites—to produce guidelines on how to replicate and scale up the experiment.

Thankfully, despite its local adoption, this idea did not catch on at the national level. It was among the few areas in the early 2020s where Canada did not fully descend into addiction-enabling madness. Yet, like-minded researchers still echo Kolla’s work.

In 2024, for example, a group of American harm-reduction advocates published a paper in Drug and Alcohol Dependence Reports that concluded, based on just six interviews with drug traffickers in Indianapolis, that dealers are “uniquely positioned” to provide harm-reduction services, partly because they are motivated by “the moral imperative to provide mutual aid.” Among other things, the authors argued that drug criminalization is harmful because it removes dealers from their social networks and prevents them from enacting “community-based practices of ethics and care.”

It’s instructive to review what ultimately happened with the originators of this movement—Kolla and the SRCHC. Having failed to whitewash drug trafficking, Kolla moved on to advocating for “safer supply”—an experimental strategy that provides addicts with free recreational drugs to dissuade use of riskier street substances. The Canadian government funded and expanded safer supply, thanks in large part to Kolla’s academic work. It abandoned the experiment after news broke that addicts resell their safer supply on the black market to buy illicit fentanyl, flooding communities with diverted opioids and fueling addiction.

The SRCHC was similarly discredited after a young mother, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was shot and killed near the organization’s supervised consumption site in 2023. Subsequent media reports revealed that the organization had effectively ignored community complaints about public safety, and that staff had welcomed, and even supported, drug traffickers. One of the SRCHC’s harm-reduction workers was eventually convicted of helping Huebner-Makurat’s shooter evade capture by hiding him from the police in an Airbnb apartment and lying to the police.

There is no need for policymakers to repeat these mistakes, or to embrace its dysfunctional, activist-driven drug ideologies. Let this be another case study of why harm-reduction policies should be treated with extreme skepticism.

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Addictions

Canadian gov’t not stopping drug injection sites from being set up near schools, daycares

Published on November 14, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s health department told MPs there is not a minimum distance requirement between safe consumption sites and schools, daycares or playgrounds.

So-called “safe” drug injection sites do not require a minimum distance from schools, daycares, or even playgrounds, Health Canada has stated, and that has puzzled some MPs. 

Canadian Health Minister Marjorie Michel recently told MPs that it was not up to the federal government to make rules around where drug use sites could be located.

“Health Canada does not set a minimum distance requirement between safe consumption sites and nearby locations such as schools, daycares or playgrounds,” the health department wrote in a submission to the House of Commons health committee.

“Nor does the department collect or maintain a comprehensive list of addresses for these facilities in Canada.”

Records show that there are 31 such “safe” injection sites allowed under the Controlled Drugs And Substances Act in six Canadian provinces. There are 13 are in Ontario, five each in Alberta, Quebec, and British Columbia, and two in Saskatchewan and one in Nova Scotia.

The department noted, as per Blacklock’s Reporter, that it considers the location of each site before approving it, including “expressions of community support or opposition.”

Michel had earlier told the committee that it was not her job to decide where such sites are located, saying, “This does not fall directly under my responsibility.”

Conservative MP Dan Mazier had asked for limits on where such “safe” injection drug sites would be placed, asking Michel in a recent committee meeting, “Do you personally review the applications before they’re approved?”

Michel said that “(a)pplications are reviewed by the department.”

Michel said, “Supervised consumption sites were created to prevent overdose deaths.”

Mazier continued to press Michel, asking her how many “supervised consumption sites approved by your department are next to daycares.”

“I couldn’t tell you exactly how many,” Michel replied.

Mazier was mum on whether or not her department would commit to not approving such sites near schools, playgrounds, or daycares.

An injection site in Montreal, which opened in 2024, is located close to a kindergarten playground.

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has called such sites “drug dens” and has blasted them as not being “safe” and “disasters.”

Records show that the Liberal government has spent approximately $820 million from 2017 to 2022 on its Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy. However, even Canada’s own Department of Health admitted in a 2023 report that the Liberals’ drug program only had “minimal” results.

Recently, LifeSiteNews reported that the British Columbia government decided to stop a so-called “safe supply” free drug program in light of a report revealing many of the hard drugs distributed via pharmacies were resold on the black market.

British Columbia Premier David Eby recently admitted that allowing the decriminalization of hard drugs in British Columbia via a federal pilot program was a mistake.

Former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s loose drug initiatives were deemed such a disaster in British Columbia that Eby’s government asked Trudeau to re-criminalize narcotic use in public spaces, a request that was granted.

Official figures show that overdoses went up during the decriminalization trial, with 3,313 deaths over 15 months, compared with 2,843 in the same time frame before drugs were temporarily legalized.

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